Ivar Giaever

Ivar Giaever
(1929)

Norwegian-born American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics
in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson for work in solid-state physics.
Giaever received an engineering degree at the Norwegian Institute of
Technology in Trondheim in 1952 and became a patent examiner for the
Norwegian government. In 1954 he migrated to Canada, where he worked
as a mechanical engineer with the General Electric Company in Ontario.
In 1956 he was transferred to General Electric's Development Center
in Schenectady, N.Y. There he shifted his interest to physics and did
graduate work at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.,
receiving a Ph.D. in 1964.

Giaever conducted most of his work in solid-state physics and particularly
in superconductivity. He pursued the possible applications to superconductor
technology of Esaki's work in tunneling, eventually "marrying,"
as he put it, the two concepts to produce superconductor devices that
flouted previously accepted limitations and allowed electrons to pass
like waves of radiation through "holes" in solid-state devices.
Using a sandwich consisting of an insulated piece of superconducting
metal and a normal one, he achieved new tunneling effects that led to
greater understanding of superconductivity and that provided support
for the BCS theory of superconductivity, for which John Bardeen (B),
Leon Cooper (C), and John Robert Schrieffer (S) had won the Nobel Prize
for Physics in 1972. It was for this work--based in part on Esaki's
and further developed by Josephson--that Giaever shared the 1973 Nobel
Prize with Esaki and Josephson.